Horror Synth — Music

To the uninitiated, John Carpenter’s music must sound like another kitschy experiment; a nostalgic attempt to recapture the appeal of 70s-and-80s creature features. But Carpenter is the real deal—the trailblazer who brought us those very features; (among others) Halloween, The Thing, Escape from New York. His style was bold in its simplicity. Even the font used in his titles has become iconic and oft-imitated. Carpenter’s film and soundtrack work provided the still-indelible blueprint for any and all aspiring schlock doctors, and he remains as dark a shadow over Hollywood as ever.

Carpenter saw a late-career resurgence in the mid-2010s. Between playing video games he toured, produced new music and re-recorded old themes. Lost Themes III: Alive After Death is his latest collection of new music. It follows two moodier recent albums with a bright, explosive celebration of horror excess and cheese. Carpenter’s trademark synths bubble over into symphonic grandiosity, where once they burbled and beckoned like a tar pit. ‘Weeping Ghost’ is the most riotously silly track Carpenter has recorded since his theme for In the Mouth of Madness, and sounds like Black Sabbath trying to summon demons to the disco.

Lost Themes III is bold and loose in composition, too. Tracks are mad and balls-out in an energising way. ‘Dead Eyes’ lopes in hunchbacked baroque, ‘Carpathian Darkness’ bastardises, corrupts, inverts and deep-fries Angelo Badalamenti’s ‘Laura Palmer’s Theme’. Even when Alive After Death takes pause it does so in style. ‘Cemetery’ more resembles the ominous material of Lost Themes I and II. But it’s supercharged with crunchy electric guitar; less mood piece, more breakdown.

There are so many ideas bursting from this LP, so many perspectives of the macabre. When listening, it's impossible to ignore how enmeshed Carpenter is with the identity of screen horror as a whole. This feels like a victory lap in every sense. Carpenter has lived to see his own legacy and is relishing in it. From the outside, it feels like the director was bullied out of Hollywood for refusing to grovel for budgets, refusing to compromise creatively, refusing to temper his politics and his biting dark comedy. He produced masterpiece after masterpiece in a style nobody wanted to see. Now, desperate for cash, those same institutions recreate and imitate Carpenter’s work—which has become impossibly fashionable. The irony must make him chuckle. There is a wonderful sense of self-parody to Lost Themes III, and a signal from John Carpenter to the world: it’s been forty years, and you’re still playing catch-up.

Alive After Death is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Beyond the Before makes no bones about its intentions. Its opening seconds play out like a John Carpenter title sequence; a goofy shot of propulsive 80s horror-house synth-pop. From here onwards the fun doesn't let up. Over seven extended tracks, Yves Malone conjures gory images from a non-existent midnight movie — one as unsettling as it is joyous.

There is a buzzing, harpsichord-like quality to the synth tone used, which contributes to this atmosphere greatly. Oneohtrix Point Never's Age Of used a similar tone to the same baroque effect last year. But in practice, his and Malone's music couldn't be more different.

In fact, Malone’s work bears more resemblance to synthwave pioneer Com Truise’s (Seth Haley). Haley's music brought forth nostalgia for non-existent times. It parodied the retro-futurism of eighties music and cinema. Beyond the Before has the same kitschy appeal.

If Haley is an eerie ancestor of the vaporwave movement, Beyond the Before is like a bittersweet photo album of him. It emphasises the tender melancholy inherent to trashy horror, just as Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein's Stranger Things soundtrack did in 2016.

That isn't to say this is a pastiche of Com Truise, or a shade of any of Haley's work. In fact, Malone's ambitions extend far beyond Haley's. Tracks often descend into beautiful noise sections in their final throes. They carry grooves for as long as ten minutes. It all looks positively avant-garde next to the no-frills synth-pop of In Decay.

And it is in these moments of experimentation that Beyond the Before lifts off. Synthwave is a genre which can exploit already-tired tropes of 80s yuppie music for the yuppies of today. But Malone often transcends the cynicism of their contemporaries to touch something sublime. This tape might not change the future. But at least it isn't trying to take the world back thirty years. An absolute riot.

You needn’t look further than John Carpenter and Alan Howarth’s masterful Prince of Darkness soundtrack for your horror synth fix. But, before that, purchase or stream Beyond the Before here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe